


making it up as i go

by ohnonnie



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Drabble, F/F, post-da2 free marches is Not A Good Place for a qunari child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-06-26 00:03:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15651666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohnonnie/pseuds/ohnonnie
Summary: Merrill let out a sorrowful sigh and crowded close again, now with the flask of milk in hand, peering down at the baby. “You poor thing. All alone. Well, we’re here now. We’ll get you somewhere safe, promise.”





	making it up as i go

**Author's Note:**

> written for the femslash language of flowers prompt 'baby's breath', which, surprise surprise, symbolizes babies! I went a bit over the word limit here & I'll probably end up writing more about my hawke & merrill going from 'oh we'll just find this child a safe place to stay' to accidentally adopting a dozen orphans.

When they discover the massacred Qunari (or perhaps Tal-Vashoth, impossible to tell), it isn’t surprising; it’s as expected as slaughtered apostates or fanatic templars at this point, just another group to add to the long list of scapegoats. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t been blamed for the incident at Kirkwall, though she, the mages and Knight-Commander Meredith are the frontrunners. Hawke wonders, looking at the bodies strewn across the encampment, if this could’ve been avoided or if this domino effect was inevitable from the start. If there’s anything she could’ve done. It haunts her, like the hundreds of ghosts that follow where she goes. No, it’s not surprising; death meets her wherever she goes.

What’s surprising is the hoarse cry of a infant slicing through the fraught silence.

It jolts Hawke out of her brooding and Merrill out of her anxious flittering. She halts in her inspection of the corpses, abandoning the futile efforts to find a pulse in order to find the source of the wailing.

" _Oh_ ,” Merrill breathes, “Ma vhenan, come here! Quickly!”

Hawke rushes over and then comes to a halt just short of the bundle on the floor.

“Oh,” Hawke echoes. “Well, shit.”

In the bundle of cotton lies a Qunari child, Maker knows how old but definitely no older than a few months. It’s horns are mere stumps and it’s hair curls stark white against it’s dark grey forehead.

Hawke, unthinkingly, picks the child up and cradles it, startling it into silence before it regains its senses and begins to cry out again.

“Oh,” Hawke repeats yet again, overwhelmed and a little distressed, but finds herself gently rocking the child. Merrill hovers at her shoulder, wide-eyed and as uncertain as Hawke.

“How long do you think they’ve been here?” Merrill asks, voice small with an undertone of horror.

The questions takes Hawke out of her daze and brings her back to her senses. “The bodies are only a day old or so. I… Do we still have that halla milk?”

“Yes, some,” Merrill replies, sounding far more sure now, rushing to their packs to root for their flask of halla milk. Thank the Maker that Varric had sent that Antivan coffee a while back and Merrill, uncustomed to the strong taste, had decided to get milk for it. “And I can get us more. That’s our priority right now. We should find a place to camp perhaps—”

The child’s crying swelled louder. Merrill let out a sorrowful sigh and crowded close again, now with the flask of milk in hand, peering down at the baby. “You poor thing. All alone. Well, we’re here now. We’ll get you somewhere safe, promise.”

The baby’s cries trailed off into a confused gurgle, blinking up at Merrill from Hawke’s arms. Merrill took this opportunity to trickle some milk into the child’s mouth. Hawke reached over, careful not to jostle her arm, and took the flask from Merrill, carrying on the task.

“We should find somewhere to camp,” she said, focusing on the child and not drowning them in milk instead of looking up. “I don’t really want to stay here. I… What do we do?”

She looks up then, finding Merrill’s face twisted into a strange expression of affection and anxiety. “We’ll figure that out once we’ve settled. I’ll set up camp nearby that willow tree we passed. You stay here with the little one.”

“Hey, no, bad idea, no splitting up.”

Merrill rolls her eyes, her expression shifting into simple fondness now. “You worry too much, ma vhenan. I’ll be just a moment.”

“If you need me, shout,” Hawke concedes, reluctant but left unable to move with a child cradled in her arms.

“I will,” Merrill calls out over her shoulder as she leaves, humoring her. Hawke huffs, but turns back the baby.

The baby burps.

“Better?” Hawke asks wryly, placing the now empty flask down on the grass. Looking out over the gory mess of a camp, she sighs. “Me and Merrill are all alone too. Got each other, though. And now you’ve got us too. Until we find somewhere better for you.”

As she says it, though, she realises finding a safe place for a Qunari child in the Free Marches is likely going to be near impossible, especially while it’s in the middle of a civil war.

“You might be stuck with us for a while, little one,” she says.

 

They stumble across a quiet village a few days later and thankfully it has an inn. A dirty, rat-infested in, sure, but it’s nothing a few arrows and cleaning magic can’t handle. Their room is newborn-appropriate in no time.

In the day, they venture out to find clothes for the child— a little girl, they discover after the blighter spoils her already-dirty rags.

“Should we...name her?” Merrill asks as they settle into their room for the night. As much as she could complain, it’s the nicest place they’ve been in since they left Kirkwall. Hawke thinks on how drastically her life has changed in the past few years, that this dirty inn room is the size of one of the estate’s closets but still far nicer than Gamlen’s place. A comforting middle ground.

“I looked through the camp,” Hawke replies, “No letters or anything, and we’ll have to call her something.”

Hawke feels strange about it, however, that this child had parents and a name now lost to them. That’s why she had searched through the camp, trying to find anything to give to the little girl. But she finds nothing.

“Any ideas?” she asks, squinting at the sleeping child to see if anything immediately comes to mind. The Qunari don’t have names, so that offers no inspiration.

“How about… Revas?”

“That Elven?”

“It is,” Merrill says, squinting down at the sleeping child as if to see if the name matches. “It means _freedom_.”

Hawke looks over at the sleeping child and thinks of the Qunari in their compound, the elves in the alienage, the mages in the Circle.

“Revas,” she says, her mild tone at odds to the furious protectiveness that crashes over her, “I like that.”


End file.
